The activity room at Rogerson Communities’ Adult Day Health Program (ADH) is a popular gathering place for participants in Roslindale. It’s a space for friends to meet, chat, play a game or do some reading. On this day, however, the room was even livelier than usual — five volunteers from insurance company Liberty Mutual were joining the older adults in attendance to make art, play bingo, share a meal, and socialize.

Rogerson’s ADH offers comprehensive services to older adults five days a week, from health and wellness support to social engagement, special outings, nutritious meals, and memory care. As participants arrived on this particular morning, the volunteers, along with ADH staff, greeted them with art supplies — paints, brushes, and canvases — and invited them to create a still life to welcome in the spring season. Their subject: lilacs, bunches of which sat on work tables in glasses of water. Though quiet at first, the room grew more animated as it filled with some 20 older adults. Each put his or her own spin on the project, some rendering tight bunches of lavender and white on green stems, others creating diffuse clouds of blended color. All the while, the Liberty Mutual volunteers crisscrossed among the tables, assisting with supplies, answering questions, or just trading stories and talking with participants.

Often, ADH incorporates art projects into its activities, but the volunteers added a new dimension, one of communication and connection between generations. All of the Liberty Mutual employees were in their twenties, just a year or two out of college, and while few had much experience with older adults other than family members, they quickly created an easy rapport with the ADH participants.

That enthusiasm for connection was mutual, according to one of the volunteers, Rukaiyaa, an analytics associate. “Someone asked if I had a younger sibling, and told me that she doesn’t have any siblings anymore. But the fact that she looked for something to connect with me about, maybe not doing it intentionally, but just the fact that she did that, and then proceeded to tell me about something personal, felt nice.”

Volunteer events like this help to make ADH the special place that it is for older adults, providing meaningful interactions in addition to engaging activities. The involvement of younger adults in particular, like the Liberty Mutual volunteers, is appreciated by Kelly Knox, Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at Rogerson.

“Intergenerational programming is vital to the well-being of older adults,” she notes, “especially those who might not have a lot of family, might not have any of their grandchildren around. The interaction just helps to keep their hearts a little bit young.”

The rewards of that kind of interaction flow both ways. As the group in the activity room broke for lunch, Nicholas, a volunteer and associate in Liberty Mutual’s analyst development program, reflected on his experience so far.

“It’s been amazing. Everybody’s been so appreciative of everything, and they’re always so open to talk to. I feel like a lot of interactions these days seem a little superficial, but everybody here’s just so happy to talk. It’s authentic. I like it a lot.”

A Lasting Relationship

Liberty Mutual is a longtime champion of Rogerson’s mission, with charitable contributions going back more than 20 years. The volunteer day at ADH represents a new level of involvement between the two organizations, however, one with a distinctly human character. It was made possible through Liberty Mutual’s Serve with Liberty program, which encourages employees worldwide to work with nonprofit organizations in their communities during the month of May. Employees can suggest organizations they want to volunteer with, and nonprofits can apply to participate as well. Rogerson reached out and Liberty Mutual was quick to accept.

“Boston is our headquarters, so we try to get as many organizations involved in the Boston area as we can,” says Allan Ebeling, Senior Program Lead at Liberty Mutual. “What Rogerson does impacted us because [elder care] is an area we would really like to stay involved with. It meets our objectives to reach out to the community to help people.”

The Serve with Liberty program, launched in 2012 in honor of Liberty Mutual’s 100th anniversary, has been very popular within the company, Ebeling notes. Last year saw a 40 percent worldwide participation rate among employees, along with 1,000 nonprofit organizations served within the U.S. “And you know how valuable those hours of volunteer time are to the budget of any organization,” he adds.

With so many options to choose from when volunteering, why did Liberty Mutual’s employees opt to spend time with Rogerson? For Nicholas, it felt like a way to repay those who had given to others, whether employers, family, or community.

“They’ve contributed so much over their time,” he says of the ADH participants. “There are different ways to give back to the community, but being able to be here and help and actually interact with them, that was what sold it for me.”